We’re excited to share that Arizona State University alum Reese Conner recently published a book! The Body He Left Behind is Reese’s debut poetry collection and is published by Cider Press Review. Winner of the 2020 Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize Book Award, The Body He Left Behind includes the poem “The Rapture.”
The Rapture after Robert Dash’s “Into the Mystic” The first thing to go was a sailboat. It was raptured, just like that. Snap your fingers, please. Like that. An old couple watched from the end of a pier. Beyond them, the sloop tickled water for a bit, shuddered like nostalgia or blackmail, then poof: The mainsail, the headsail, the hull, all the boat jargon lost specificity like a ghost, bleeding form and crying vowels. The boat peeled from the water, stretching a paintbrush of pixels in its wake as it rose. The skyline, too, began to glaze, and the sea poured upward into it, everything a swarm of movement. Imaginative men who witnessed it thought things like justice. The old couple joined hands now. And everyone who knew Robert Hass knew he was right: everything was dissolving, spiriting away towards a more perfect self of itself. As more world blurred upward—housecats, tire swings, entire orchards—a gentle murmur spread in the bellies of the observant, who saw even the ugly things begin to ascend—blobfish, Smart Cars, murder weapons, every issue of Us Weekly— and thought, or began to think: What about us? And they were all naked now, they noticed— clothes lifted from them like water in a dry heat. Some ogled the newly-naked world with intention. Others began to tantrum—violent or existential, all unable to translate what must have felt like betrayal. And that old couple, still holding hands, looked skyward and stood up on their tippy toes.
Cats are a major theme throughout the collection. But not only is there ample mention of cats, the poems speak to us:
These are singular, quietly soaring poems. They innocuously but effectively reach for greater truths regarding the animal nature of our beings and where we as individual humans fall on that hierarchical scale. In these poems, we so easily find in their dailiness depths of feeling we recognize immediately, even if we have never said so aloud before. They artfully connect us to something important inside ourselves. Simply put, these are heartfelt—and powerful—love poems to and about cats, poems of genuine grappling with human sensibility. These are near sentimentality all the time, but without sentimentality. This is dangerously wonderful territory for a writer, and the poems explore their terrain well. They simply make us feel, so that even as they are about cats, these poems humanize us.
Alberto Rios, Author of A Small Story About the Sky
The Body He Left Behind is available for purchase from Cider Review Press. Find more from Reese on his website. Congratulations, Reese!
Today we are excited to share fantastic news!
We are happy to share news that 
Our friends in the poetry center at University of Arizona will be benefitted by part of a $200,000 grant, thanks to the Ford Foundation. The grant will be administered by the Academy of American Poets and given over two years to the many members of the Poetry Coalition. U of A is one of the founding members of the Poetry Coalition, and provides literary access to many different audiences. The goal of the grant is to create a national program themed around social importance from leading contemporary poets. To find out more information about the grant, click